Official Secrets

Year 13, Day 22 - 1/22/21 - Movie #3,724

BEFORE: OK, I've had enough of politics for a while - time to stop watching MSNBC and learning about the new Biden administration goals, to counter the failures of the Trump administration, and watch a movie to take my mind off of it.  Only darn it, look what's come up in the rotation, a film about politics.  Even worse, it's like a re-run, because we're flashing back tonight to the start of Gulf War II in 2003.  Or "Operation: Enduring Freedom", or "Viking Hammer" or whatever it was they called it back then to disguise their little irrational war. 

Indira Varma carries over from "The One and Only Ivan". 

THE PLOT: The true story of a British whistleblower who leaked information to the press about an illegal NSA spy operation designed to push the U.N. Security Council into sanctioning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  

AFTER: OK, stop me if you've heard this one, a Republican President stretched the truth just a bit when convincing the American people what was in their best interests.  But this one served TWO terms, and started two wars which we now realize were unjust, and also his Vice-President had financial connections to the main defense contractor who benefited from those wars.  In retrospect, the whole thing stinks to high heaven - yet Bush and Cheney were never called out for their lies and B.S. and the fact that American soldiers died for no reason, except for Bush to get revenge on Saddam Hussein and Cheney to own more valuable stock in Halliburton.  

(Don't let my opinion of Bush/Cheney distract you from how bad Trump was, though - by comparison, Trump was much, much worse in so many ways, had ten times the scandals, wasted more money on the border wall, lined his own pockets in ways we don't even KNOW yet, and caused the death of more people through his lack of pandemic response than in any war we've ever had.  But I just don't think Bush and Cheney should have ever been let off the hook, they should have been charged with war crimes at some point.  I don't think they've ever been pardoned, so technically, it's still not too late.)

But the main thing that the two situations have in common - when the President lies, people die.  Whether that happens in a war or a pandemic, it scarcely matters.  More people died because those two Presidents lied - and in 2003 that meant more Iraqi and Afghani people, along with U.S. soldiers.  Quick update - did anyone EVER find "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq?  Nope, and to this date, Republicans maintain that's because they were on trucks and were being moved around in the desert.  Well, we had satellites and drones, didn't we?  If we had eyes on those trucks at some point, why didn't we follow them around?  

At the same time, a little thing called the Patriot Act allowed the U.S. government to spy on its own people, record phone conversations and the like, in the hope of finding out where any Al Qaeda agents or collaborators might be. This horrible invasion of privacy has not even been revoked yet, and it's like 17 years later.  So for all we know, somebody's still listening to everything we say, which is why certain ads keep popping up in your Facebook feed, I think.  Just for fun, my wife and I like to talk about exotic vacations on the phone, just to see what ads pop up when she goes through Facebook.  

This film is about the U.K. being basically railroaded into supporting the Iraqi invasion, because the U.K. was a member of the U.N. security council, that has to officially approve wars and stuff.  One woman working for the U.K. equivalent of the NSA - over there they call it the GCHQ and it's not in a pentagon-shaped building, but a round one nicknamed "The Doughnut".  All of the transcribing work that Katharine Gun does for the GCHQ allows her to sit at home and watch the news and point out whenever a politician is lying.  Meanwhile, in America, we all learned to do that every time Trump talked about anything.  

Katharine is aware that the NSA is looking for "dirt" on member states Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, in order to influence them to support the Iraqi invasion, and she leaks this information to a reporter at the National Observer.  The memo is from a mysterious CIA agent named "Frank Koza", and it's difficult to even prove this man exists, because the operators at the CIA are very, very good.  They won't confirm someone works there, like even if you call and say you're returning Frank's call, they'll say like "Frank who?" and "Can you spell that last name?" and then "Can you tell me the nature of your call?"  One little slip-up and you'll be given the dreaded, "I'm sorry, there's nobody here by that name..." or worse, "Oh, sorry, he's in the bathroom again, you just missed him."  Clever, clever operators...

The Observer reporters eventually confirm the source of the memo, and they run their exposé, only to have it pointed out that the memo couldn't POSSIBLY have come from an American agent, because he spelled "favourable" with that extra "U" and "recognise" with a British "S" instead of an American "Z".  So the memo gets discredited as a fake, and it's too late to point out that a well-meaning staffer had run the whole article, including the quoted memo, through Spell Check, which I think in the U.K. is called Spelle Cheque.  Damn those British, why can't they all speak good old American English?  

Meanwhile, Katharine confesses to leaking the memo, to stop the persistent investigation of her colleagues.  Even if she had the best intentions, even if the actions described in the government memo were illegal, even if the U.K. leaders knew they were approving an unjust war, there's still a little thing on the books called the Official Secrets Act, and therefore Katharine still gets prosecuted, for violating that. Since she's married to a Turkish Kurd, it's assumed that she had another motive for trying to stop the war, perhaps something silly like saving Kurdish lives in Iraq.  Boy, how misguided would THAT have been?  

With the help of the NCCL (boy, the Brits love their acronyms, don't they?), Katharine's lawyers are able to argue that at the time the memo was leaked, high-ranked U.K. officials were still speaking out against the war, so technically her actions were not out of line with theirs.  In a twist worthy of a "Law & Order" episode, the charges are dropped, presumably because evidence presented in the case would have revealed that Tony Blair's government did lead the U.K. into that war under false pretenses.  

But if you're wondering where the philosophies behind so many of Trump's lies originated - classics like the non-existent Mexican caravan, the China tariffs, the Bowling Green Massacre and even the Ukraine "quid pro quo" scandal, take a look back at the "Saddam Hussein has WMD's" falsehood that justified the Iraq invasion. Nobody really knows for 100% certain, but come on, probably no WMD's, and no direct link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Therefore no connection between 9/11 and the reactionary Iraq War and Afghanistan War, though they may have made Americans FEEL better for doing something.  

By the way, this is why Trump was like Bush/Cheney cubed, and clearly the worst President ever - on Wikipedia, the page "Trump Administration Controversies" isn't just a page, it's a CATEGORY, with 16 sub-categories, and 186 PAGES of scandals in all.  If you're still supporting this man, for whatever reason, may I suggest that you've got some reading to do.  But it feels like most Americans now have little interest in past events such as the Iraq War, because this film made less than $2 million in U.S. box office, and just over $10 million worldwide.  To be fair, in 2019 we all had pretty full plates with all of Trump's ongoing scandals.  Starting an unjust war while in office was probably the only thing he DIDN'T do.  

Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "Greed"), Matt Smith (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "A Single Man"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Adam Bakri, Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Conleth Hill (last seen in "Whatever Works"), Tamsin Greig (last seen in "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Hattie Morahan (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Ray Panthaki (last seen in "28 Days Later..."), Angus Wright, Chris Larkin (last seen in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World"), Monica Dolan (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), John Heffernan (ditto), Jeremy Northam (ditto), Jack Farthing, Clive Francis (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Kenneth Cranham (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Darrell D'Silva, Janie Dee, MyAnna Buring (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Niccy Lin, Chris Reilly (last seen in "Allied"), Shaun Dooley (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Peter Guinness (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Hanako Footman, Lindy Whiteford, Will Barton, Katherine Kelly, Raad Rawi (last seen in "Spy"), Raquel Cassidy and archive footage of Tony Blair (last seen in "Vice"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Colin Powell (last seen in "Quincy") and Ari Fleischer. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 barristers in powdered wigs (still?)